Professional service and awards: Associate professor, Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education, University of Tennessee; chaired an energy storage panel for the National Academy of Engineering; Carl-Eduard-Schulte-Prize, German Engineering Society; Eugene P. Wigner Fellowship Award, ORNL; Werner Köster Prize, German Materials Society; Early Career Award for Engineering Accomplishments, ORNL.

Community service: Greater Area Knoxville Swimming Association volunteer; FIRST Robotics mentor; FIRST Lego League team coach

What he likes to do in his free time: Garden, fish, boat, bike and hike; visit Dollywood with his wife, Isabell, and their children, Kijan and Stina.

Claus Daniel sees great potential in electric vehicles."I'm excited about electric vehicles because I think they can be a game changer," says Daniel, deputy director of the Sustainable Transportation Program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

For starters, they're a step toward energy independence.

"Currently, all transportation depends on petroleum and all we think about is gas prices when we run our vehicles," he says. "When you have an electric vehicle, you free yourself from one source of fuel and the supply of fuel can be diversified."

He also sees them as a gateway to reinventing vehicles.

"With the whole way information technology and communication is going … we can think about self-driving vehicles and vehicles that communicate with each other," he says. "At some point, vehicles will never crash anymore and that's getting really exciting because then you can really tackle efficiency of vehicles."

Researchers are working on some of these technologies within the Sustainable Transportation Program. Daniel's own research focuses on developing affordable and longer lasting batteries for electric vehicles.

"There will be competition for resources in the future and the better positioned we are, the better off we are as a society and people," he says.

Daniel also helped establish the country's largest open-access Battery Manufacturing Research and Development Facility.

"While we are looking for electric vehicles to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, we risk coming into dependence on foreign batteries," he says. "I'm looking to develop a domestic market, a domestic supply chain, so we can bring those jobs back to this country and get people employed."

The facility provides a place for manufacturers and scientists to "analyze every aspect of battery production, from raw materials to finished products," in an environment that protects their intellectual property, according to Daniel and the facility's website.

"With that kind of arrangement, we are able to bring a lot of companies to East Tennessee who are spending their research dollars here," he says.

Daniel advises students at the University of Tennessee's Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education, where he is an associate professor. In addition, he mentors high school students through the FIRST Robotics program and is a FIRST Lego League team coach for younger students.

"These kids see how exciting it can be to create something," he says. "It makes me very excited and joyful when I see a light bulb go on in their head and when they say, 'Wow, this is very cool.'"

Daniel believes the future of our country depends on tomorrow's leaders maintaining that enthusiasm for creating things.

"When we're manufacturing technology here in this country, we create wealth and that's what we need in a society to stay competitive in the worldwide marketplace."